Anime Movie Review – Summer Wars

Summer Wars

Love Machine

Summer Wars is a animated film directed by Mamoru Hosoda with by the acclaimed Madhouse and distrubited by Warner Bros. Basically the film tells a story featuring the protagonist Kenji Koiso who’s a high school math genius and Natsuki Shinohara the most popular girl in school. Natsuki tells Kenji that she needs him to do her a favor an travel with her to Ueda. It’s her grandmother’s 90th birthday and she shocks Kenji by sugesting that Kenji is her fiance. While in Ueda Kenji is falsely accused of hacking the in movie virtual world “OZ”. In truth an AI named “Love Machine” was responsible stealing the avatars of many including Kenji. Love Machines hostile takeover of OZ resulted in world wide damage. Kenji along with most of the Natsuki’s family attempt and succeed to stop Love Machine.

The Avatar’s have range from cute to strange to tough.

My first impression of Summer Wars was it’s similarity to Digimon (especially the first movie). I don’t considered that comparison a negative by the way. Summer Wars surprised me mostly with the family depicted. I thought they were very realistic in their depiction. The bickering, black sheep (Wabisuke Jinnouchi), the different generation conflicting and interacting. The action depicted in the movie was good but sparse. I think one of the central themes of this movie was the potiential dangers and downsides of an society with an ever increasing reliance on technology. Overall, I enjoyed this movie there was surprising humor, deep characters and a realistic family as well as some sadness.

Action was fluid

I decided to give a more accurate rating system to my post. 1.0 being horrible 5.0 being average and 10.0 being perfect.